DSO - Webb Farry Lawyers ‘Michael Houstoun plays Mozart’

Pianist Michael Houstoun has announced he will retire at the end of 2020, so this is possibly the last (or penultimate) chance to hear this giant of New Zealand music perform as a concerto soloist. The concerto he will play, Mozart’s Concerto No. 14, was described by the composer as “entirely special” and after Mozart had performed as soloist in its first performance in 1784 he said that “the

new concerto I played won extraordinary praise”.
 

Conductor Tianyi Lu trained in Auckland and is now Assistant Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and recently appointed as the first Female Conductor in Residence of the Welsh National Opera and a Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. She is clearly a conductor to watch and we are delighted to feature her for the first time.

 

Given the theme of a celebration of Otago University for the 2019 concerts, the programme opens with Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture which includes the ‘Gaudeamus igitur’ melody, the light-hearted song associated with universities around the world. The concert closes with Richard Strauss’s Aus Italien. Brahms encouraged Strauss to visit Italy and this tone poem is the result. It consists of four wonderfully varied and evocative depictions of Italian scenes.

‘…provides audiences with “undeniable momentous” performances…’